I was invited as Aidan Hetherington to take part in the panel for the IBC the other panel members were Alex MacPhie, Jeremy Webster and Scott Mcarthur. It was good to see the enthusiasm and drive of the future of the consulting industry and grow the links between Edinburgh University and the IBC.
Some time ago I was asked to try and review RationalPlan by Tiberiu Ghioca. There are two versions of the application Single Project and Multi Project. The version I used was the Multi Project Version which retails for around $98 per user (compare this to MS Project more about that later).
The one obvious advantage along with the price is the fact the application works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS-X. This is appealing as I am among the few Windows users (by the way I am happy with this) in most of the projects I work on. So finally a Project Management application that is not online (I travel a lot and do not always have easy access to the Internet) that can be shared among all the users on a project. Continue reading
The Institute of Business Consulting held its Awards at the Langham Hotel in London, the best attended Awards so far with around 190 attendees. The entry standard was extremely high. A good night was had by all and I am looking forward to the next year.
I was pleased to Sarah Goodwin of InDepth Consulting receive an award reflecting her long term support of the IBC.
I just thought i would post some images from the night.
Today I was involved in an interesting conversation on the concept of Leadership ranging from current Management thinking and progressing back towards more esoteric texts that touch on the concept of leadership.
This brought the conversation back to the Tao Te Ching (In English “Way Virtue Classic” or more commonly “the Classic of the Way and it Virtue”) and seeing the connection between the words of Lao Tzu and my work. The orginal text was written around the late 4th and early 3rd century BC.
Looking at current leadership thinking which is mostly focused on developing, growing and empowering individuals within the team. This has grown in recent times from the motivational and spread across the management thinking. It brings me back to the same section of the text everytime:
In order to master people
One must speak as their servant;
In order to lead people
One must follow them.So when the sage rises above the people,
They do not feel oppressed;
And when the sage stands before the people,
They do not feel hindered.
This passage has influenced me in my understanding of what leadership should be although it has been something that I have struggled to implement in my own leadership style.
Last nights Scotland in Business which was focused on looking at security and securing your business. The event was attended by a mixture of IBC Scotland members and Scotland in Business members. This is potentially the first of many joint events.
I have just installed the new version of Pocket Informant and why it is early in the day I am realy impressed by the GTD functionality.
Still early days but with less than 1 hour of use, I still need to see about a form of desk top synchronisation but may have found my trusted system.
Still trying to get a invite for Google Wave and reading everything I can on it at the moment. Found this really good video explains Google Wave. As open source products go this may have the most impact on web development so I am following with great interest.
I attended the CloudCamp event in Edinburgh University last night and was really impressed by the format, turn out and the most Pizza I have ever seen in one location. There were well over 100 attendees and some fantastic speakers the event passed quickly.
The speakers included:
There was a lot of focus on using the Cloud in commercial applications to support scalability and costing with some good demonstrations. I will be looking to use more Cloud based technology as the caching of pages in the Cloud is of interest.
I just seen this video from “Global IT Consultancy” Thought Works it just made me laugh.
RT @ianburgess Facebook as a Collaborative Knowledge Management System http://bit.ly/c748hE #UOKM
@DiscoverTheKey love the new brand, good to see its all working for you coffee soon? Working on "Makeup of Consultancy Industry" for Edinburgh Uni MBA consultancy panel tomorrow.
